


A Beginner's Guide to Locked Tomb Mysteries

by lonelywalker



Category: The Locked Tomb Trilogy | Gideon the Ninth Series - Tamsyn Muir
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-21
Updated: 2020-12-21
Packaged: 2021-03-10 20:47:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,534
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28223397
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lonelywalker/pseuds/lonelywalker
Summary: “If you're going to analyze impossible situations,” Camilla said, “why discuss fantastical fiction?”“Because,” said the Warden, frankly, “we’re in a science fantasy story, and we don’t fool the reader by pretending we’re not.”
Relationships: Camilla Hect & Palamedes Sextus
Comments: 4
Kudos: 31
Collections: Yuletide 2020





	A Beginner's Guide to Locked Tomb Mysteries

**Author's Note:**

  * For [tabacoychanel](https://archiveofourown.org/users/tabacoychanel/gifts).



> Summary and section titles adapted from _The Hollow Man_ (1935) by John Dickson Carr.

**1\. A Series of Coincidences Ending in an Accident**

Camilla had been packing, which was to say agonizing over whether there was anything else that she was going to regret _not_ packing when she was knee-deep in guts or bones or interminable Third House cocktail parties with oodles of folderol and teeny-tiny finger food that was at least eighty percent air.

Sharing a room with her necromancer was tradition, especially when that necromancer was Master Warden of the Library and she was the Warden’s Hand. Particularly when there wasn’t enough space for her, Palamedes, and his books to squeeze into her shuck. Camilla knew she held a lifelong short straw where that triad was concerned. Part of her duties involved imposing order on chaos, always having the right item to hand… But that was made a little difficult when the Warden kept using all those items as load-bearing pillars in elaborate book-fortresses.

So she was on her knees looking for a pocket torch when Palamedes picked up the letter yet again and said: “We need to talk about Gideon.”

The letter had been the talk of the Sixth House for weeks which, in Camilla’s mind at least, only reinforced how deathly dull the Sixth House could get without a captivating intellectual conundrum to keep everyone’s fidgeting at bay.

Ordinarily she would have studied the letter with all the care and scrutiny of an Alexandrite being sent off to battle, where every sub-clause in every mission briefing could mean life or death. However she was fairly certain that if that poor flimsy was subjected to even another single sidelong glance it would disintegrate out of sheer stress.

The Warden had that effect on, well, everybody.

Archivist Zeta had pored over it too. Almost everyone who was anyone had, but they had been looking at something other than the content - at some kind of aura that extended far beyond the page, inscribing the very air with illuminated letters: _THE KING UNDYING’S THOUGHTS HAVE BRUSHED OVER THE EXOSPHERE OF OUR EXISTENCE_. Zeta had at least related to the words themselves, to Lyctoral lore and tradition and precedent. The Warden, unimpressed by this macro-thinking, had decided to interrogate the poor missive down to its molecules while Camilla did menial things like brush up on her rapier skills and retrieve her measuring tape from the vast unexplored dusty regions beneath her bed.

“Who’s Gideon?” Sounded like a Second House name, but neither the Cohort necromancer nor the cavalier who had been summoned to the First.

“Gideon Fell,” the Warden said, which sounded like both a name and a sentence. “A pre-Resurrection fictional expert in the theory of mysteries involving hermetically sealed rooms.”

Exactly which part of that did he expect her to query first? “You mean… a character in a book from ten thousand years ago.”

“I do. We’re about to embark on a once-in-a-myriad journey… Course of study… Trial… We don’t have the faintest idea. Just two letters, and all they’ve revealed is niceties and ceremony. I’m pretty sure immortality doesn’t come bound up with niceties and ceremony, so there must be more to it. The tests may have already begun. I just wish I knew how.”

Camilla didn’t bother pointing out just how much of mortality was bound up with niceties and ceremony, and that no one with as many titles and honorifics as the Necrolord Prime was going to start sending them messages like he was some terse junior archaeologist with a courtesy bypass.

“The more optimistic way to look at it is that we’re not any less prepared than anyone else,” she said.

The Warden decided to clean his glasses. Again. Maybe she should pack some spares. “Do we know that? We don’t even know that the others received the same letters, or that they received them at the same time. Never assume a level playing field.”

“Lady Septimus…”

Without his thick lenses, his slate-grey eyes seemed sharper than ever. His voice, however, remained soft and level. “Lady Septimus is no longer our close confidant, perhaps not even a truly known quantity. We have never met, never dueled… Besides, she shouldn’t be thinking of attending.”

“Hard to turn down an invitation from the Emperor.”

The Warden sighed. “Were I in her condition, I would gladly turn down any and all invitations and stay in bed with a book. But the preponderance of the evidence has already demonstrated that we are far from the same person.”

If he was going to insist on cleaning his glasses, bending the arms alarmingly, she was going to give her rapier a once-over. “Assuming this is a competition, not collaboration, could anyone be better prepared than us, even with advance warning?”

“Three months isn’t much, I’ll grant you, but there are far too many unknowns to even bolster speculation. Who has shown their hand at gatherings and birthday parties? Lady Septimus I know better than my neighbors, but still have never met. And that’s before we account for those Houses further afield.”

Camilla picked up the knife she’d been using as her offhand in training - nicely weighted, but unfortunately giving the impression that she was some malevolent sous chef. “We’re finally going to realize the Eighth and Ninth really were just made up to scare the balls off cheeky kids.”

The Warden shrugged. “Maybe some of them. That tomb, though… The Locked Tomb. There’s a mystery I wouldn’t mind solving.”

“You mean, what’s inside,” Camilla said. “Ask an anchorite, take your shot.”

“What’s inside is a novice-level question, Cam.” He replaced his glasses and let himself tip back onto the bed so he was gazing up at the ceiling. “And this is where Gideon comes in.”

  


**2\. The Effect of a Haunted Room**

This chamber had been difficult to get used to at first. Even with the classic Sixth lack of windows and other apertures, the amount of space around them was enough to provoke agoraphobia alongside a cavalier's instinctive wariness of unsecured areas. The fusty, closed warmth of her shuck had always felt safe. Despite the fact that she now shared a room with a mighty necromancer and a whole arsenal of weapons, the Master Warden's chamber still gave her the sense of sleeping on an airfield. What was the First going to be like? Light. Airy. _Wet._ And indisputably haunted.

“Apologies, Warden. I should’ve realized that solving the conundrum of Dr…” Camilla coughed. “Dr. _Sex_ ’s locked room when we were thirteen meant that we could now progress to solving the conundrum of the Locked Tomb without even being on the same planet.”

He eyed her from his position on the bed, folding his hands over his beltline. “I wonder what they’re like, the Ninth. Reverend Daughter Harrowhark Nonagesimus…”

“Ominosity in a word,” Camilla said. “If that’s a word. And the first cavalier, Ortus… Ha. _Mortus_ would be more appropriate.”

“That was his father.”

“Oh.” That was the Ninth for you, sucking humor into an airless void.

“I’m not worried about the cavalier. Ninth Cavs are notoriously beasts of burden. No athleticism, no finesse. The Reverend Daughter, though… I'd love to pick her brain.”

“Black Nuns are notoriously chatty.”

“And Master Wardens seem foreboding and regimented. We're not all what our titles would suggest. If you spent your life watching over a dread tomb, surrounded by skeletons and supplicants, wouldn’t you be aching to tell someone all about it?”

“Me, sure. But I think you’re overestimating the conversational skills of someone who’s spent her life watching over a dread tomb, surrounded by skeletons.”

“Don’t be reductive, Cam.”

Camilla studiously modeled the behavior of not being reductive. “So we're going to the First House so you can prove yourself worthy of becoming a Lyctor, probably by passing some mysterious test, and you're worried about solving a completely different mystery. Without psychometry, without touching anything, without even being there.” 

“I'm not so sure it's a completely different mystery. Once we look outside the Sixth and start thinking about the First, about the Emperor and his Saints, the Locked Tomb might become the key to everything. Not just what's inside, but why and how.” 

“If the Reverend Daughter wants to talk… You believe you can solve the mystery. What if all she knows is what we all know. There’s a tomb. It’s locked.”

“But as you said, she’s spent her whole life watching over it, and her parents and grandparents before her. I would posit it’s impossible to spend years focusing your life on a single thing without forming some opinions and theories about that thing.”

Camilla made a noise. “Fish. Water.”

“Fish are not necromancers. You can’t blindly swim through the world, flailing about, when there are theorems and anatomy and intellectual curiosity. I already have a few ideas.”

“Ideas. About the Locked Tomb?”

“Think back to Donald Sex’s study. First, we know that there must be a solution, an answer. A series of events took place that led up to the hands being found on the desk. Second, we know that these events must fall within rational, plausible explanation. Those two simple facts exclude a myriad of absurdities. Why lock a tomb, Cam?”

She shrugged. “To stop someone getting in. Or to stop someone getting out. A revenant, a prisoner. Valuables. Relics.” If there were a third person with them, whoever that third person was would probably have started pondering audibly about blasphemy and whether the Emperor’s Auricles and Ossicles might be listening in.

“The Mithraeum seems a more eminent home for valuables and relics. Or the First itself. And a revenant or prisoner… For some ten thousand years? What lives for ten thousand years?”

In her head, Camilla turned over that old maxim about never trusting something that could bleed for seven days without dying. “After this trip, maybe you. Maybe… Coronabeth Tridentarius.” If nothing else, Corona’s hair would certainly outlast the heat death of Domenicus.

She had assumed this was the answer he was looking for, or at least the answer he expected her to give. But his response was a look that went beyond disappointment, a look that was almost… stricken.

“People assume necromancers must be obsessed with death,” he said finally. “I don’t think that’s true at all for the Sixth. Death is just one of many facts. We’re obsessed with _answers_. But the Ninth…”

“Birds. Sky.”

“My breath remains bated for your next metaphor.”

“I’m thinking something desert-related.”

A draft blew through the room. Camilla rolled her eyes at the vents and their sense of dramatic timing.

  


**3\. An Illusion, Simple But Effective**

Minutes passed. Camilla marked them by clanging weapons around in the least numinous way possible. 

The Warden finally spoke. “What’s it like to live on the brink? Because I feel that’s where we’re going to be. On the brink of death, or Lyctorhood. And maybe the Ninth haven’t just had three months to prepare. They’ve been there all their lives.”

Camilla considered the idea of the Ninth ascending to Lyctorhood. She didn’t need to ask Palamedes what he thought about it. The Emperor’s Saints from 10,000 years ago seemed more mythical than anything else, as though they came from an age when people were… less like people? Now, thinking about eight House heirs, even when some of them were nothing more than names, who would she want to have limitless power and immortality?

Well, Palamedes, obviously.

Not that he was flawless. But his major flaw - a big moral stick up his ass - was something she didn’t mind hindering God’s Hands and Gestures a teeny little bit. And what was the alternative? God’s Frippery and Pomade from the Third? God’s Pimples and Hormones from the Fourth? 

“Lyctorhood is the prize,” the Warden continued. “What I wouldn’t give for that knowledge, that potential and power to do a greater good at the side of the Kindly Prince.”

Camilla knew when he wanted her to serve as punctuation. “But.”

“But we must also consider our position, my position, as the warded lock. I would gladly ascend, or see someone else as worthy and good-hearted, like Lady Septimus, do the same. As for the others… Better that none ascend than something darker befall us all.”

“If a Lyctor is in the Locked Tomb…” She fingered the guard of her rapier. Pokey pokey. “The Kindly Prince wouldn’t be so kindly if the wrong person ascended. Fool me once, can’t get fooled again.”

The Warden sat up, gripping the edge of the mattress with both hands. Nerves. Or determination. “Let’s not rely on a _princeps ex machina_ , Cam. I have every confidence that we can solve this mystery and watch our backs at the same time.”

“One flesh, one end.” Really, two short-sighted eyes and two double-bladed short swords. Same difference. “You mean the mystery of ascending to Lyctorhood, or…?”

“I feel that discovering what ancient evil lies in that tomb might fall under the category of watching our backs. We’re playing on a different level, now.” 

“And this is why you're thinking about ancient murder mysteries?”

The Warden shrugged. “Best case scenario, the Locked Tomb is truly nothing more than an inert monument to a fallen foe and the entire Ninth hierophancy is based on the misconceptions of people generations ago who preferred to worship a rock than end their lives. It makes a lot of sense, but when have we ever lived in a universe where the most banal option was more likely to be true?”

“Is that what your new pal Gideon says?”

“Not exactly. He talks a lot about icicle bullets and chimneys. I'll give you a copy.”

Camilla let her raised eyebrows do the talking.

“The point is, when it comes to locked rooms… And Locked Tombs… You have to consider what you know in terms of physical reality and discard what you only assume. Our brains love to extrapolate entire pictures from the tiniest glimpse, a whole person from the corner of a coat. It's a great strength but also our undoing. Let's not take anything for granted on the First.” He coughed at the dust cloud she'd managed to kick up. “The Ninth, though… If only we had the advantage of that kind of thanergy on our doorstep. We’re good with locks.”

Camilla tugged at the zipper on her case. “You know what opens any warded lock, right?”

She could somehow hear Palamedes pursing his lips without looking up. The mattress bounced a little as he stood. “I should get back to the library. I'm working on another kind of lock, a failsafe, that might save us from just about anything. You’ve packed the kit? Gel? Tape? Scissors?”

“Woo, vacation,” she said in a monotone, giving the case a hearty smack.

He threw off a gesture that was almost a mock Cohort salute, but he left without a smile, his lambent eyes focused on something far from her sight. Camilla sat down heavily on the case, already thinking about everything else she would need to fit in there and how, no matter how much she organized and how much he researched age-old texts, they weren't really prepared at all.

Damn the Ninth. 

Damn their tomb. 

And damn their _skeletons_.


End file.
